From
the year 1400 to the end of WW II, there was always at least one war going on
somewhere in Europe. Then, for eleven
years, there were none. In 1956, the
USSR (briefly) invaded Hungary. Then
interstate wars disappeared again until 58 years later, in 2014, when Russia
invaded and annexed the Crimea.
And now
Putin is at it again, rolling through the Ukraine.
In
2011, Steven Pinker’s book, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” detailed the
extraordinary reduction in violence and war that humanity has witnessed since
the Middle Ages, and especially over the last 150 years. An entire chapter is devoted to the complete
disappearance of certain types of conflicts, specifically the imperial war to
acquire colonies and the colonial war to keep them.
And now
there’s Putin.
Those
of you who read this blog, or have observed the world recently, will not have
spent a lot of time lately worrying about the resurgence of colonial wars and
the reemergence of the great imperial bear of Mother Russia. My fear, and perhaps yours, has been the
growth of an emerging fascist world government based in a strategic partnership
among President Xi, the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, Globo-Capitalists,
Silicon Valley and Big Pharma. It scares
the bejesus out of me, but not because I envision foreign tanks encircling
Philly and unleashing artillery fire on the doggie park near my house. That’s not what the modern bad guys do. Instead, they force you to take medicines
because if you don’t, they won’t let you out of the house and you can’t have a
job or travel on a train and they disappear your money so you can never have
fun or see your kids. And even if you
take the shots, they make you wear a diaper on your face to prove you will obey
them forever.
And
they do it all from their chalets in Davos.
That’s a key point here. Nobody
wants “territory” anymore. Bill Gates
doesn’t want to march troops into Donetsk Province in the Eastern Ukraine. Fauci doesn’t want to set up shop in
Starobilsk, though I hear the pierogis are to die for. Those guys just want to push buttons and have
their well-educated, woke foot-soldiers adjust your DNA, edit your social media
postings, and empty your brokerage accounts if you ever try to buy a gun.
But
Putin invades things, for some reason.
He invades places all the time it seems, and then there’s the exotic
poisons that wind up inside Russians who don’t like him, and the mangled bodies
of dead journalists.
All of
which brings to mind Condaleeza Rice’s assessment of Putin about ten years ago
(which I will have to paraphrase since I can’t find the exact quote): “Vladimir
Putin is a bad actor, but there are many bad actors we have to deal with. The problem with Putin is the 5% chance he is
delusional. I mean, who wrestles a tiger
bare-chested?”
And
that remains the problem. An
invasion? With bombs? Blowing up people and buildings and
bridges? It’s like the 19th
Century never ended, and Putin the Great will be riding through on a choo-choo
soon, reviewing his peasants and their quaint little cottages. Condy’s estimate was a 5% chance Putin is
delusional. What is it now? 10?
25? 50? The true significance of his desire (in
2022!), to seize “territory” in frozen hellholes like the Eastern Ukraine is
that it proves he is mentally ill. Once
you win, you have to build the bridges again.
And fix the potholes. In the 21st
Century, doing this 19th Century stuff means you are nuts.
The
neo-isolationists, or whatever they are now called, are telling us he will stop
with the Ukraine, and there’s no vital U.S. interest at stake, and we can’t
always be policing the world, and it would just be another 20-year war we wind
up losing. And I can’t say they’re
wrong. I don’t see any point of getting
involved in a war either. But Putin has
nukes, and there’s a very good chance he’s a fruitcake, so we have to take him
out. What happens between Russia and the
Ukraine may be largely irrelevant to us in the West, and it’s largely
irrelevant to me, but the existence of a guy like Putin is a danger to everyone,
so we have to kill him.
Except,
we don’t really do that sort of thing.
********
You
don’t read much about the 1815 Congress of Vienna these days, but I guess I’m
still pissed off about it. It’s at the
root of our Putin problem.
Europe
in 1815 was a jumpy place. Napoleon
Bonaparte had just spent twenty years rolling through the continent conquering duchies
and principalities and grand cities, and deposing various monarchies hither and
thither. In addition, the American
Revolution and the French Revolution had birthed a number of liberation
movements full of people who were considering new ideas about individual
liberty and national sovereignty. And
all this was happening in a world where you could still find feudalism if you
looked for it, and where a large majority of the world population lived on the
equivalent of $2 a day until they died at the age of 30 or so.
So an
Austrian named Metternich and some other statesmen from Russia and Prussia and
England and France had a meeting in Vienna and basically turned back the clock.
It was
a peace conference, or it was billed as a peace conference, and what it did to
establish peace was to reinstate and bolster all the faltering monarchies in
Europe and protect them with dozens of treaties and alliances. Up until the Congress of Vienna, it was
more-or-less accepted that if Prince Rupert of the Dominion of East Westwick
was getting a little soft in the gray cells after eighteen generations of
incest, it was OK to push him aside and install yourself as the new kingpin.
But the
Congress of Vienna changed all that. The
numerous treaties concluded at the Congress had the effect of installing the
modern understanding of national sovereignty across Europe, though no
individual treaty did so explicitly.
From 1815 on, sovereigns (primarily monarchies) could not be taken down
simply because they inconvenience you or because you want their harbors or vineyards. Instead, a reciprocal understanding developed
among European states: your Prince Rupert is just as legit as our Grand Duchess
Hildegarde.
A few
months after the Congress, in Paris, the Holy Alliance was forged among
Austria, Prussia and Russia. This agreement
went even further. Its purpose was to
restore monarchies and the divine right of kings, and even return colonies to
the imperial powers that had lost them.
The
unfortunate result of these agreements was to protect national governments from
external challenges without regard to how cruel or ineffective or authoritarian
those national governments might be. And
this idea of sovereignty survives in the reluctance of modern governments to
kill despots like Saddam Hussein or Bashir Assad or Vladimir Putin. It is actually illegal in many countries,
including the U.S., to assassinate foreign leaders. See: Executive Order 12333, signed by Ronald
Reagan on December 4, 1981.
Authoritarians
in America, by which I mean leftists, regularly lament the need for democratic
governments to build consensus and implement change incrementally, rather than
impose some utopian vision in an instant.
But one of the most important advantages democratic countries have over
authoritarian ones is that the legitimacy of democratic states is rooted in popular
support. What this means is that the
sovereign represents his nation and that any attack on the sovereign is an
attack on the nation itself.
For
example, I personally have nothing but contempt for Joe Biden. In fact, I don’t really view him as a real
person. To me, he’s more of a Max
Headroom character, or an avatar shared by Bernie and Barack and Nancy and
Chuck in the D.C. Metaverse. However, I
would view a physical attack on him by a foreign power as an attack on me
personally. He is the president. He is
the democratically-elected (sort-of) symbol of America. Killing him would be an act of war.
On the
other hand, there is almost nobody in Russia who would view the assassination
of Putin as an assault on their beloved homeland. The only real support an autocrat ever has is
from those who depend on him for their own stream of corrupt influence and
power and money. Most people, in Russia
and elsewhere, would regard the violent end of Putin as an inevitable result of
his own murderous nature. Nobody misses
Saddam. Nobody misses Ceausescu. Nobody will miss Kim Jong-un. Nobody will miss Putin.
This
difference, the legitimacy of an elected president versus the illegitimacy of a
thug like Putin, is a tremendous advantage for the democracies of the world
over the thug-ocracies like Russia. Yet
we never take advantage of it, though it would not be difficult to do so.
The
assassination of Putin could change the world.
Incentives are everything. You
only have to vaporize a few Putins and Saddams before the position of murderous
psycho dictator becomes a lot less attractive as a career destination.
********
Some
theorists on international law have suggested that dictatorship itself should
be outlawed as a violation of basic human rights. I suppose the world is not ready for such a
doctrine, but with traditional warfare becoming less common and more frowned
upon, it is not outlandish to hope for a time when violent, evil sovereigns
come to be viewed as madmen and criminals rather than legitimate rulers of
nations.
There
are problems with such a concept, of course.
The only way it can work is as a matter of raw international power
politics, but there will be attempts to regulate the process or bring it under
the control of NGOs and bureaucrats and lawyers. That can never work. Only some combination of near-universal approval
and raw military superiority can prevent an assassination of this type from
causing more problems than it solves.
There
is also the objection that taking out somebody like Putin might lead to
retributions and further retributions and ultimately to wars, but that is
unlikely. Obama and Hillary managed to
kill Muammar Qaddafi (despite U.S. law) by pulling the rug out from under him
and allowing his many enemies to kill him, but no larger international wars
resulted. Libya became a lawless place
and largely remains so, but is it truly worse than when the only “law” was Muammar
himself?
In any
event, that’s not my problem. And it’s
not my proposal. I’m not suggesting we
FIX some hellhole, I just want to eliminate the madman at the top. If another psycho-killer takes over, kill him
too. We know nation-building doesn’t
work, so let’s try something simpler.
Eventually the murderous lunatics will grow less ambitious and somebody
like John Kerry will rise to the top and bore everyone with his climate-change warnings. Problem solved.
In any
event, the danger that killing a sovereign nut-case will lead the world to
spiral out of control is non-existent.
The true peril is that, like today, nothing will be done about the real
monsters that we all know are monsters. Many nations have laws on their books against
killing them, and most world leaders are perfectly comfortable with that. In part, it is because Joe Biden and others
like him have real doubts about their own legitimacy. But it is also because Biden and his peers
are neither brave, nor aggressive, nor decisive. They’re just not very good leaders and they
won’t take the steps that need to be taken.
That’s why, when somebody like Putin comes along, they don’t know what
to do about him.
Copyright2022MichaelKubacki
Posts
